When Tropical Storm Lee created a storm surge over Labor Day weekend, the surf brought in a new array of tar balls to some Gulf Coast Beaches. The Alabama communities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach, still cleaning up this new oil from the Macondo Well, have requested British Petroleum bring in more beach cleaning machinery to ensure the clean-up is done right.

British Petroleum refused.

Instead, BP will increase the hours of the cleanup workers. BP spokesperson, Ray Melick, said crews would get rid of the oil on the beaches.

Which brings us to the metaphor for the entire cleanup process, actually for the entire “making people whole” line of bullshit BP has been spreading for almost a year and a half now.

Philip West, a city coastal resources manager for Orange Beach had this to say about BP’s plan: “A lot of times after storms, you clean the surface of the sand,” West said. “You pick up what you can see, run a beach cleaner through it. But in some areas — and there are various reasons for it — there could be some buried debris, so you have to run plows. You have to be very thorough and we just don’t think a SCAT guy with a shovel probe punching a few holes is that kind of thorough that we would need.”

BP, cleaning the surface of the sand…while leaving what can’t be seen where it is…just like Corexit dispersant sank the oil to the seafloor, out of sight, just like they’re quick to attack the surface of any problem in the Gulf, while leaving the cause buried deep below.

Clean enough, whole enough, cheap enough…but none of it right enough to fix the mess they created by not being safe enough.

The aftermath of Tropical Storm Lee continues to demonstrate to people like the Coast Guard, British Petroleum, Ken Feinberg and various members of the Obama administration just what happened to all the missing oil…apparently it’s still below the surface of the water, waiting for the opportunities presented by hurricanes and tropical storms to come up on the beach and say, “Hey guys!”

“”In some locations, the mats fell apart and tar balls blew up the beach and into the back marsh,” Norman (Land Manager for the Wisner Donation Trust) said. “The surge also uncovered oil snare and pieces of equipment that got buried during the BP oil spill response, including all these stakes that were used to hang the snare in the water to catch oil.” Norman said a BP representative was inspecting the beach on Wednesday, even as she and her staff were assessing the oil and equipment.”

Norman also had some unkind words for the work of the British Petroleum’s oil spill response, which included the building of barriers to keep oil out of the wetlands, barriers which were never removed and are now creating some difficulty.

“”They had built a huge land bridge and three sheet metal dams to close breaches and prevent oily water from moving inland,” Norman said. “We asked when they installed them to remove them when they were no longer needed. When the storm came in, all of a sudden, we’ve got brand new breaches in areas where it never breached before. They’ve completely altered the hydrology along the beach,” she said.

At several spots where contractors did use heavy equipment to dig out tar mats last year, the unconsolidated sand used to fill the holes has washed out and been lost to the beach, Norman said. Norman said the uncovering of the new tar mats and tar balls should come as no surprise. The trust has been complaining to BP and Coast Guard officials for months about oil remaining just beneath the surface of the beach sand and just offshore.”

British Petroleum…the gift that keeps on giving. In fact, they’re doing everything they can.

Over the past year, there’s been much speculation about where the oil from the Deepwater Horizon went. Maybe it got disappeared by magical microbes. Maybe it’s all on the sea floor, and maybe more important, if it is on the sea floor (which several studies suggest), what happens if the area gets hit by a hurricane, will the oil resurface?

Well, no hurricanes yet, but how about a tropical storm?

As Tropical Storm Lee hit land along the Gulf Coast over Labor Day weekend, it didn’t just bring rain, the heavy surf it churned up also brought tar balls. Samples are being collected for testing to find out if they are from BP’s oil spill.

The tar balls ranged from the size of marbles to that of a baseball and they washed up across several beaches. From Grant Brown, a spokesperson for the city of Gulf Shores, Alabama, “It confirms our fear that there are tar mats just offshore and that we may have more tar coming in whenever there’s a storm,” he said.

Connie Harris, a tourist staying at a condominium with friends in Gulf Shores came back from a walk and had to scrub her feet, “When we walked on the beach, we had tar on our feet,” she said.